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Transcribed by the Official Shorthand Writers to
the Houses of Parliament:

Taken
before the Innovation, Universities, Science and Skills Committee

on Monday 10 November 2008

Members present

Mr Phil Willis, in the Chair

Dr Ian Gibson

Dr Evan Harris

Dr Brian Iddon

Mr Gordon Marsden

Ian Stewart

________________

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: Professor Brian Launder, University of Manchester,
Dr Dan Lunt, University of Bristol,
and Dr David Santillo, Greenpeace,
gave evidence.

Q1 Chairman:
Good
afternoon. It is very nice to see
you. Could I welcome our first panel of
witnesses to this, the geo-engineering case study within the Innovation,
Universities, Science and Skills Select Committee's investigation into
geo-engineering, and to thank very much indeed, Dr Dan Lunt of the University
of Bristol for joining us. Welcome to
the Committee. And Professor Brian
Launder from the University of Manchester, welcome to you, Brian, I hope you
enjoy your experience with us. We have
an empty chair for Dr David Santillo who is geo-engineering the Tube at the
moment to try and make sure that it arrives on time! When he arrives he will join us on the
platform. I wonder if I could start with
you, Professor Launder. Could you tell
the Committee, as briefly as you can, what is your understanding of
geo-engineering? What is it?

Professor Launder: Geo-engineering is the
beneficial intervention in order on a global scale to change the climate in
directions that we wish in the context of severe global heating with which we
are threatened. It amounts to looking at
schemes that will either provide a shade against incoming solar radiation or
ways of withdrawing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Q2 Chairman:
It is
not sensible, is it, Dr Lunt? It is not
a serious suggestion, is it?

Dr Lunt: It has certainly been
suggested seriously within the scientific literature and also it is out there
in the public conscience. There have
been some articles in the popular press and the scientific press as well. It is certainly out there and is certainly
being considered seriously within the scientific community.

Q3 Chairman:
In
terms of the scientific community, and we on this Committee take the science
community very seriously most of the time, where is the consensus within the
scientific community on geo-engineering?

Professor Launder: I would say that of those who
have looked at the issue 90 per cent believe that we are in dire straits and
the only way of escaping is to give time to move towards a genuinely almost
carbon-free lifestyle globally, we must have a period two or three decades at
least, but perhaps indefinitely, where we rely on the types of intervention
that I have hinted at in order to give time.

Q4 Chairman:
Are
you actually saying that this is a technology, or a group of technologies,
which will seriously buy us sufficient time in order for us to have the
long-term solutions to the amount of carbon we are putting into our planet?

Professor Launder: They have the potential. Sceptics could say, "Well, this hasn't been
tested" or "That hasn't been tested".
What is very urgently needed now is to properly evaluate, to spend
enough time developing schemes from the drawing board to at least an operational
scale where their effectiveness can be evaluated so that one may discern barely
workable schemes from those that really do work.

Q5 Chairman:
Dr
Lunt, do you buy into this, that this is a holding technology with the
potential to be a long-term solution?

Dr Lunt: I guess this has to be a
personal viewpoint really. For me, I
would be very worried about seeing this as a long-term indefinite
solution. Any sort of geo-engineering
that is carried out should also be carried out at the same time as a concerted
effort to reduce emissions, a move to more energy efficient lifestyles, new
technologies, so that we do not have to rely on it indefinitely because there
are certainly worries about some technology that you have to rely on
indefinitely because of the problems of it failing or becoming too
expensive. If we do aim for it, we
should certainly aim for something that is temporary.

Q6 Dr
Gibson: This is not scientists just making up the
terminology to be unique and set up their own little enclave of conferences and
so on? There have been examples of this
in the past. Is it a serious concept
that came out of conferences at the beginning or is it just a dream in
somebody's head?

Dr Lunt: I do not know of any
conferences that have been solely about geo-engineering, but certainly within
the very major conferences in the geo-sciences, for example the AGU, which is
the big American geo-science conference, and the EGU, which is the European
one, for the last few years there have been dedicated sessions to geo-engineering
and there has been a relatively large number of submissions. It is not just a thing that people discuss on
internet news groups, it is actually out there in conferences, yes.

Professor Launder: The first scientific papers
on what we have started to call geo-engineering emerged in the 1970s. By the beginning of this century there was a
very well-developed feeling amongst a group of scientists that we would need to
move towards that. In 2004 the Isaac
Newton Institute in Cambridge
held a two-day event on the topic and more recently there have been expert
group meetings in Harvard. It is by no
means a fanciful group of scientists looking for some easy way to get money.

Q7 Dr Gibson: Some of the effects of geo-engineering ideas
may be irreversible, is that so? Professor Launder: In the short-term if, for example, we simply
cut down the incident sunlight by two or three per cent in order to cool the
planet but do nothing about the level of CO2 in the
atmosphere that will increase the acidification of the oceans and those effects
will be irreversible, yes.

Q8 Dr
Gibson: Who are your big competitors in this field in
terms of the way forward? Are you in the
Coca-Cola Championship or are you in the Premier Division as against the other
technologies? Give us a picture of it
because we do not know where you sit as against other mitigating technologies.

Professor Launder: Personally, I would be
delighted, and I think this probably goes for the majority of the experts you
will be talking to, if somehow someone had a magic bullet that would discover
how to make fusion work and we could use that for all of our power. I just do not see it happening fast enough.

Q9 Dr
Gibson: The man on the Tube will speak for himself
when he arrives, but how do you see the criticisms that Greenpeace have
levelled at the issue in terms of morality, ethics and so on? You must have had this levelled at you many
times, I am sure.

Professor Launder: I do not think I can answer
that simply because I have not acquainted myself sufficiently. I just keep my head down like any
eager-beaver scientist.

Q10 Dr
Gibson: Does that mean that you do not care about the
morality?

Professor Launder: Not at all.

Q11 Dr
Gibson: You are opening up that point.

Professor Launder: Let me say more than anything
else what alerts me is when I look across the Sunday lunch table and see my two
granddaughters who are five years-old and think what will they inherit in 25/30
years' time.

Q12 Dr
Gibson: Dan, what do you think about this area of
morality and ethics?

Dr Lunt: I am not completely aware
about the Greenpeace arguments, but my understanding from what I think David
would say if he was here is if we go down this route of geo-engineering then
there is the danger that in the public mind if there is a solution out there
then they do not need to be energy efficient, reduce their energy use or
whatever. Personally, I do have some
sympathy with that, it is a fair argument, but it is very difficult to test
whether that would be the case or not.
These geo-engineering ideas are out there already and certainly a
proportion of the public are aware of them.
My impression from talking to friends is it is not affecting their
decisions about energy use at the moment.
In terms of the ethics and morality, it is a case of is it the lesser of
two evils. The idea of geo-engineering
per se to me is pretty grotesque really in some ways, but if it is the lesser
of two evils then maybe that is the route we have to go down.

Q13 Dr
Gibson: Where do you chaps get your funding from?

Dr Lunt: I have not been in the field
of geo-engineering very long at all so I would not call myself a complete
expert. The one study that we have done
and carried out at Bristol
that I led just arose out of a chat over coffee. I think it was an article in the New Scientist or something talking about
geo-engineering and we thought that was something we could try and we did it in
our spare time using free computer time on the university machines. No funding.

Q14 Dr
Gibson: What did you work on before?

Dr Lunt: The geo-engineering stuff was
and still is completely in my own time, if you like. My actual speciality is I am a paleoclimate
modeller, a past climate modeller and future climate modeller.

Q15 Dr
Gibson: You must get funded, Professor Launder?

Professor Launder: My field of research, I
hasten to say, is not in geo-engineering.
I will not bore you with how I
got involved.

Q16 Dr
Gibson: How did you get your chair?

Professor Launder: I am a mechanical
engineer. Gosh, I have forgotten what I
was going to say.

Q17 Dr
Gibson: So what got you into this geo-engineering
stuff? What was the light that suddenly
shone? You said your granddaughters, but
it does not happen just like that.

Professor Launder: Besides that, there was a
geo-engineering conference held in Cambridge
in 2004 and I went along to that and was persuaded that it was very important.

Dr Gibson: Has Prince Charles found out
about this yet? He has not pronounced on
this yet, but I bet he will.

Q18 Chairman:
Before we get on to Prince Charles, you
mentioned earlier about the issue of scaling up, Professor Launder, and so far
there have been a number of laboratory experiments, and we have obviously got
evidence about some of those, which seem to be incredibly interesting.

Professor Launder: Laboratory and field trials.

Q19 Chairman:
If I
can be frank with you, a few years ago this Committee did a piece of work on
carbon sequestration long before that became a popular move, and we were
looking forward to one large scale demonstrator plant at Peterhead, which never
came off. That was a proven technology
which we knew could be scaled up.
Scaling up geo-engineering on a global scale seems to be the most
incredulous challenge and yet you feel it is possible.

Professor Launder: Yes, I do, but on the point
you raised there is still a huge gap between the PhD type of research that Dr
Gibson was mentioning and actually putting it into practice. There is an awful lot of development and
detailed design activity.

Q20 Chairman:
But
we have not time, have we, if what you are saying and, indeed, what I think
Greenpeace would accept, is the current scientific consensus?

Professor Launder: We have not time not to,
Chairman.

Q21 Chairman:
That
is a very good point. You think there is
time to do this developmental work to get large-scale demonstrators up and
running so that this is a serious technology which could be deployed?

Professor Launder: Indeed. I mentioned in my submission the Carbon Trust
as a source of support for that. The Carbon Trust currently seems to be focused
on carbon-free power generation. I think
a proportion of its budget should be earmarked for the type of geo-engineering
activities that we are discussing.

Chairman: We will come on to funding in
a minute because I think that was behind Dr Gibson's comment, that you are not
getting any funding, this is your own interest at the moment.

Q22 Ian
Stewart: Good afternoon, both of you. Brian, the Chairman pressed you a little bit
about scaling up and buying time. Will
there come a point where buying time is no longer possible?

Professor Launder: This is a personal view. My feeling is that one can only rely on this
to buy time if we are looking at decadal timescales of a few decades. If we continue to accumulate carbon dioxide
in our atmosphere faster than we can take it out or it diffuses out into the
sea or vegetation then we have the most gloomy prospects for the planet. I think some of the people you will be
speaking to have a somewhat different view, but personally I would see geo-engineering
as something that we might do for three decades, at most five, and we must
ultimately get a way of living, perhaps a much reduced population on the globe,
powered by nuclear fusion and direct solar power. We will have to look at routes like that.

Q23 Ian
Stewart: Do you agree with that, Dan? Also, how do we guard against some of this
stuff becoming almost like a global climate insurance policy?

Dr Lunt: First of all, I do agree that
it is of the order of decades probably that we are looking at if we do want to
use geo-engineering, it is probably along those timescales. In some ways what is necessarily wrong with
having an insurance policy, a back-up, in case?
At the moment geo-engineering is in a situation where it could not be
used tomorrow, we could not turn it on tomorrow, there needs to be some sort of
spin-off in terms of research and development before it could be used, but if
that research and development does happen it does not necessarily mean that it has
to be used at the end of that if it is deemed not necessary at the time. To have it as an insurance policy is maybe
not a bad thing.

Q24 Ian
Stewart: Do you agree with that as well, Brian?

Professor Launder: Indeed, yes.

Q25 Ian
Stewart: The public money that is going to be spent on
known mitigation technologies, would we not be better spending the money on the
existing known technologies rather than risk it being put into supporting
geo-engineering? In any case, has
anybody got any idea of how much the geo-engineering stuff might cost?

Professor Launder: I am sure some of the speakers
you will be coming to a bit later on for the particular technologies they are
advocating will be able to give pretty precise sums for costs. When I say "pretty precise", within an order
of magnitude.

Q26 Ian
Stewart: A guestimate.

Professor Launder: I do not think I should
trespass on areas where they are ---

Q27 Ian
Stewart: Is it a good use of money then?

Professor Launder: Is it a good use of
money? Undoubtedly, I believe it is.

Q28 Ian
Stewart: Why?

Professor Launder: Because if the climate gets
out of control all of the other ways of spending the money are worthless.

Q29 Ian
Stewart: You believe it is that big, do you?

Professor Launder: I believe it is that big,
yes.

Q30 Dr
Harris: In some other technologies, controversial
ones, they are often defended on the basis that there will be spin-out effects
that will be beneficial even if the ultimate aim does not come to fruition and,
secondly, the research and development, even short of implementation, will
create jobs. Is this a job intensive
field in the development even if it is never implemented? Can you argue that you are going to invent
something and produce products useful out of it even if you do not get the
ultimate end product?

Professor Launder: I am sure there will be
beneficial spin-offs. I think we are too
near the beginning in our attempt to get towards a point where we implement it
to be able to see many of them. One as
an example: for deploying cloud brightening techniques, Stephen Salter has
developed a lot of interest in Flettner vessels, vessels that are powered by
spinning cylinders. I am sure his work
on that will stimulate a lot of interest in reverting - I say reverting because
at the end of the 1920s such a vessel crossed the Atlantic
- to a means of providing much cheaper power than normal ship propulsion.

Q31 Dr
Harris: Professor Lunt, do you know of ay collateral
benefits?

Dr Lunt: Apart from the one that Brian
has mentioned I cannot really think of any.
I guess the only thing that would come into my head is if maybe there
was a natural climate disaster, something that meant temperatures raised, maybe
some of these technologies could be used in that instance.

Q32 Dr
Harris: So it is different from fusion because fusion
is creating a lot of useful stuff anyway, albeit we are still some way away
from practical use, but it is different, it is more of a binary decision. You are going to work on this in order to
implement it really.

Dr Lunt: I think that would be the
primary driver, yes.

Q33 Chairman:
Can I
just welcome Dr David Santillo. We are
sorry you have had trouble getting here.

Dr Santillo: My apologies.

Chairman: Not at all. You have come in at an interesting time. I am going to ask Dr Gibson to return to one
of his earlier questions on the moral maze in just a minute, but we will go
back to Ian Stewart and follow his line of argument.

Q34 Ian Stewart: Hello, David. Basically, the drift of the questions I have
asked is, is geo-engineering necessary?
If it is necessary, is it only going to buy us time for a set period? Even if it buys us time for a set period, is
it a good use of public money, and has anybody got any idea how much it is
going to cost? Take your pick!

Dr Santillo: Or all four perhaps! The fact we are having this discussion as to
whether it is necessary or not is a measure of the fact that we have done too
little so far to address the problems at source. I would really caution against seeing this as
being an option that has yet to be developed because we are at the stage where
we have very little concept as to whether a lot of these geo-engineering
techniques will actually contribute to mitigating climate change. There are circumstances in which they could
actually exacerbate problems. It is
vital that however research is carried forward in any of these fields, it is
not a barrier to, a distraction from, dealing with the real problem. I have not had the benefit of being at the
first part of this discussion and those points may well have been taken up and
discussed. Those sorts of fundamentals
are important before you even begin to consider what some of these things may
cost. If we have very little evidence
that they are actually going to do anything beneficial in the first place, that
is the first point to try to address.

Q35 Ian
Stewart: Let me ask you a final point. One of the definitions that we have had about
this issue, what is geo-engineering, runs like this: global action intended to
mitigate climate change. Do you agree
with that?

Dr Santillo: That seems a very general
definition.

Q36 Ian
Stewart: The question that arises from it is if an
action is not global, is it not worth doing?

Dr Santillo: No, not at all. A lot of the actions that we can and should
be taking to address climate change are not in themselves global actions, they
may be very local or regional actions to address the problem. In fact, they have to be if we are going to
tackle emissions at source. To have a
general definition of geo-engineering simply as being global action to address
climate change, from my understanding geo-engineering is more those types of
activities which attempt to manipulate planetary systems and to exert their
global influence in that way. There is
perhaps a need for a more specific definition of what is meant by geo-engineering.

Q37 Dr
Gibson: Nice to see you. I do not know what Tube it was, do tell us.

Dr Santillo: It was Great Western Trains
that held us up, I am afraid.

Q38 Dr
Harris: We call that a predictable phenomenon.

Dr Santillo: Indeed.

Q39 Dr
Gibson: David, you have brought the phrase "moral
hazard" into this on the grounds that all the speculation may lead eventually
to worsening the whole thing. Can you explain that in a little more
detail? What is the moral hazard?

Dr Santillo: The concern that we have is
that while a lot of the discussions that are taking place are now précised by
the acknowledgement that geo-engineering should not be a distraction from
tackling emissions and energy efficiency, the fear we have is that inevitably
it will be a distraction. At the moment
there seems to be a proliferation of different discussions, projects, bodies
discussing this particular issue, and we are concerned that the promise of
something in the future, however speculative it may be, however unproven it may
even be in terms of its effectiveness, may seem to give some kind of hope that,
in fact, we can tackle climate change without tackling the real problems of
emissions and greenhouse gases at source.
In the public's mind there is a danger perhaps that people will favour
what they see to be a solution which does not involve them changing their way
of life, does not involve them having to make difficult choices, if they can
simply contribute to a scheme which somehow very distant from them will
engineer the climate back to its normal state.

Q40 Dr
Gibson: Is this the technological fix argument?

Dr Santillo: That is right. That is the danger, that however much we wish
that it will not be a distraction inevitably it will be.

Q41 Dr
Gibson: How do you make the decision which
technologies are worth proceeding with?
I know you do not believe in GM particularly, but stem cells you
might. How do you make these decisions
about the morality and involvement which should allow it to go ahead or
not? Is there a cut-off point?

Dr Santillo: The approach that I have
suggested in my evidence to this Committee is perhaps something that could be
pursued for geo-engineering in general.
Just a couple of weeks ago the London Convention, which is the
convention which prevents pollution from the dumping of materials in the oceans
and, therefore, has an interest in ocean fertilisation schemes, came to a
resolution that there had to be a way of permitting what it called "legitimate
scientific research" to continue while at this point closing off any more
practical applications of geo-engineering.
In that case, that was specific to attempts to fertilise the oceans but
it could equally well apply to attempts to manipulate atmospheric conditions or
other technologies that are included under geo-engineering. The elegance of it is that it does not say no
to new scientific studies, it simply says that there should be a consistent and
precautionary set of rules that need to be applied by all countries in order to
determine what is legitimate scientific research into these techniques and what
is not. A very key part of that has to
be a consideration of the commercial involvement because if there is an element
of commercial interest in those experiments having a particular outcome, I
think that would counter that legitimacy in terms of research.

Q42 Dr
Gibson: I suppose you have thought for a long time
about these problems, always worried that in the developing countries they are
going to get the brunt of it and yet they need to expand their economies and so
on. How do you relate your moral dilemma
to that?

Dr Santillo: I think there is a danger
also that for the more time that we in the richer nations look to
geo-engineering solutions, the less time we are putting to exporting the good
technologies and the more sustainable technologies.

Q43 Dr
Gibson: Such as?

Dr Santillo: Such as renewable energy,
integrated transport solutions, measures to improve efficiency of energy units.
All of these things the developing world is crying out for and if we take our
eye off the ball and look to future speculative solutions there is a danger
that we will take our eye off the ball from that as well.

Q44 Dr
Iddon: Mathematical modelling is getting
exceptionally better but it is still subject to the innumerable variables that
you have to put in to get into predictive mode.
Where climate change is concerned we know so little about certain of the
variables that you need to plug in. For
example, very little is known about the behaviour of the sea, which is a huge
player in climate change, we all accept that.
How sophisticated would modelling have to be to predict the effects of
geo-engineering? Have we got to that
stage at the moment?

Dr Lunt: We are at that stage. A number studies have been carried out in a
mathematical modelling framework that have looked at this problem. In terms of are the models suitable, the
models that can be used to predict the outcome of some of these geo-engineering
schemes are exactly the same models that are used to predict unmitigated
climate change. The predictions by the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are carried out by the same
model. I would argue that these models
are at a stage where they can be used in predictive mode. These models do a very good job of
predicting, for example, the climate change that we have seen over the last
hundred years. If you compare these
model estimate of climate change from 1900-2000, they are actually very good
and agree very well with the observations.
I would argue that they are in a good state for being used for this
purpose to look at the geo-engineering problem.

Q45 Dr
Iddon: What I am saying is that I do
not believe that the modelling that places like the Hadley Centre are doing at
the moment are sophisticated enough to predict even climate change, although
they are getting there but there are still lots of variables that I think they
do not understand that need plugging into their systems. How on earth can you use something at that
stage to predict something beyond predicting climate change?

Dr Lunt: To make a prediction about a geo-engineered
world you do not have to change your model very much at all. Your mathematical model will be exactly the
same as the one that is used to predict just normal future climate change.

Q46 Chairman: I think the point Colin is making is that that is imperfect.

Dr Lunt: Yes, it is certainly imperfect. The question is how good is good? How good do you need your model to be before
you start interpreting the results? All
I can say is that it does a good job compared to the observational record that
we have had so far. There cannot really
be any other test. We can go further
back in time and look at how well these models predict, for example, the last
ice-age and again they do a good job, but how good is good? How good do you want your model to be? The general consensus among the climate
community is that the models are obviously getting better and they are
including more and more parts of the earth's system. At the moment there is a lot of work going
into putting a representation of Greenland and
Antarctic ice-sheets within these models and a more complete representation of
vegetation. We are getting to the point
where we have earth system models now that represent every part of the earth's
system. I think these models are of
sufficient quality, they do a good job compared to observations and they could
be used for this task.

Q47 Dr
Iddon: One of the ideas is to put
mirrors into space to reflect the sunlight.
Do we know how many mirrors we would have to put up there and the extent
of the coverage of those mirrors in terms of reflection to lower the earth's
temperature by just one degree?

Dr Lunt: There is one study of which I am aware that
looked into the engineering aspects of mirrors in space and the idea was a
number of discs, each about 60cm in diameter, and there would be several
trillions of these up in space placed in orbit between the earth and the sun
about five times further out than where the moon is.

Q48 Dr
Iddon: That is a huge cost. Can I put it to you that if I was making
mirrors I would put them in the Sahara Desert and I would generate steam in the
way that can already be done. There has
been a development project that, so why bother to go to all the cost of putting
the mirrors up there when we can generate our power down here without using fossil
fuels.

Dr Lunt: I agree with you. Of all the geo-engineering solutions that
have been proposed, I am sure it is not the most cost efficient. The person who did the study estimated the
cost - it was quite a broad number he came up with - to be several trillion
dollars which, according to some estimates, is not much more than the Iraq
war.

Q49 Dr
Iddon: We have to develop Africa
yet. We cannot even feed the people in
Africa. Let's put the geo-engineering
ideas into some kind of priority. If you
say that is not a priority, what is a priority in terms of geo-engineering?

Dr Lunt: If you were definitely going to go down the
line of geo-engineering, if that had already been decided - a real costs
benefit analysis has not been carried out yet so that is one thing that I think
would have to be done first and I do not actually know what the answer is -
some of the solutions that Stephen Salter has been suggesting about sea spray
and cloud condensation might be more economically feasible. If that costs benefit analysis was carried
out it should also be carried out in the framework of looking at other
solutions to climate change and mitigation and adaptation, because to do
geo-engineering on its own does not make any sense; it needs to be compared to
other solutions.

Q50 Dr
Iddon: You are interested in
sunshades. Could you guide us through as
to how you believe that sunshades would work?

Dr Lunt: We did one study on sunshades. I would not say that means that I necessarily
advocate them, but in terms of how they would work, they would reduce the
incoming radiation from the sun. We
found that you could reduce the amount of solar radiation to offset a four
times increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. You would probably try and match the global
average temperature to be what it was maybe in pre-industrial times. One of the things that we found, and Ken
Caldeira found before us, was that you do not retrieve exactly this
pre-industrial climate that you are searching for. You might get the global average correct, but
what you find is that there were residuals in that the Arctic
would be warmer than in pre-industrial times whereas the tropics would be
colder.

Q51 Dr
Iddon: What are these sunshades
physically?

Dr Lunt: In this proposal they were thin discs 60cm in
diameter made of some sort of silicon-based product, I expect. I am not sure about the engineering details.

Q52 Dr
Iddon: If things went wrong could we
retrieve them?

Dr Lunt: I do not know the answer to that question.

Q53 Mr
Marsden: Professor Launder, your
colleague, Dr Lunt, has just referred to the Iraq war and so perhaps I can be
forgiven for referring to one of its architects, Donald Rumsfeld, who said that
there were known unknowns and unknown unknowns.
I would like your view as to which of those two categories
geo-engineering fits into? We talked
about how new geo-engineering is as a science.
Is it a known unknown or is it an unknown unknown? Is it something that is completely off the
wall or something that there are basic principles that we can understand?

Professor
Launder: There are many basic principles that are known
and there are many unknowns in the whole science. The previous questions related to how good is
the theory. You may have looked at
predictions of the way global temperatures will increase and from the present
they fan out. There are many different
models giving somewhat different results but they all go in one direction. The urgency is not entirely established.

Q54 Mr
Marsden: It has been reported in a
small scale that countries like China, even as recently as the Olympics, and
the Soviet Union have experimented with all things that will actually change
the climate temporarily. Do we know if
there are any national governments that are currently pursuing an active programme
of geo-engineering research?

Professor
Launder: In the free world research sponsorship is done
by agencies which are not closely tied to governments and certainly there are
such projects in the US, the
UK
and elsewhere.

Q55 Mr
Marsden: What about those countries
which are not subject to the same sort of vigour and democratic scrutiny, like
Russia and China? Surely they are going
to be as affected by the issues of global warming as anybody else?

Professor
Launder: Indeed, yes.
I know that China
is doing a lot of work on essentially trying to de-carbonise its society. It is investing a lot of money there but I do
not know what it is doing in the area of geo-engineering.

Q56 Mr
Marsden: Dr Lunt, our own government,
both DIUS and Defra, have indicated in their submissions to us that
geo-engineering technologies may play a role in future efforts. Are you aware of that being anything more
than just a pious hope, or is anything going on in government that might give
you and your colleagues some comfort?

Dr Lunt: I am not aware of any major projects that are
planned in terms of geo-engineering. I
noticed in one of the written submissions from the Research Council of the UK
that one of the things they are considering, it said, was a geo-engineering
IDEAS factory, but I do not know any more than having seen that.

Q57 Mr
Marsden: I ask that question because
the history science is, so far as I can see, never just a question of top down,
and it is certainly never just a question of bottom up; it is a question of the
interrelationship between those two things.
Is it not the case that if you expect to get your ideas seriously on the
public agenda that those people who are in support of geo-engineering research
have got to put their head above the parapet a little more and have got to get
things out more into the public arena and get a major debate going? Professor Launder, is there any evidence that
you have got the critical mass to do that?

Professor
Launder: I would say that the critical mass has been
reached. The fact that this Committee is
inquiring into it is some signal. The
Royal Society took upon itself to publish a special issue of the philosophical
transactions devoted to this subject.
The Royal Society is currently developing independently of that a position
on geo-engineering. I believe that it
will be producing a paper next year on this.

Q58 Mr
Marsden: How are people in this area
communicating all of this with policy-makers?
We had Professor John Beddington before us recently. What are you doing to get the ear of people
like him in government?

Professor
Launder: I have to say that I do not know.

Q59 Mr
Marsden: You are coming along here
today saying that this is in its infancy but we have some interesting ideas to
be taken forward. Unless you are able to
create that critical mass of involvement and to grab the policy-makers, then
you are not going to get very far, are you?

Professor
Launder: The policy influences on government tend to be
made through scientific groups. The
Royal Academy of Engineering is pressing in that direction through its
president; the Royal Society is pressing for progress in that direction; I know
the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, to which I belong, is very active in
that.

Q60 Mr
Marsden: You think that, relatively
soon, we are going to have a critical mass of evidence of argument that
government departments, like Defra and DIUS, will have to take notice of?

Professor
Launder: Partly I would say we do not have all the
evidence but we cannot afford to wait.
We must get involved in field trials and experiments that will enable us
to discriminate between the techniques that do not really work as effectively
as others.

Q61 Mr
Marsden: Dr Santillo, does not what
Professor Launder has just said sound to you like a reasonable basis upon which
to proceed? I have read the evidence
submission you have made and I have heard what you have said today. Some might say that, 20 or 30 years ago, your
ideas might have been regarded as fairly off the wall, so why today are you
being so down on geo-engineers? Is it
not perhaps because you are the new orthodoxy?

Dr Santillo: I think if any of our ideas were considered to
be off the wall 20 or 30 years ago, they are certainly not now.

Q62 Mr
Marsden: That is exactly the point
that I am making.

Dr Santillo: Perhaps we shall need to see where some of
this research goes. The critical mass
that we have at the moment is simply a reflection of the fact that more people
are talking about geo-engineering techniques.
It is not in itself an indication that we have greater evidence that
these techniques are actually going to do anything productive and I think that
is a very important distinction to make to come back to your earlier question
on known unknowns and unknown unknowns.
We are dealing clearly with a spread here but I think there are rather a
lot more unknown unknowns than there are known.
When we talk about something as complex as planetary systems - my
expertise is mainly in the area of ocean systems - I think the fact that we
have better models of the way in which these things will happen is sometimes
misinterpreted as being filling in all of the gaps. A model somehow fills in the gaps in our
knowledge that we have. Of course,
models will always be limited. We are
dealing with systems where we are not simply going to answer all of the
questions with further and further research.
At some point it needs to be a policy decision as to whether this is an
appropriate way to go or not.

Q63 Mr
Marsden: You do not even think they
should get started, do you?

Dr Santillo: What I have said is that if there are
proposals that people wish to bring forward for research into geo-engineering
techniques, what we need is a globally harmonised system for evaluating those
to make sure that they are actually legitimate proposals and that they will not
in themselves have a negative impact on the very planetary systems that they
are studying.

Q64 Dr
Harris: You have set that out in your
evidence, which we have read. Do you
think the British Government agrees with you or does it agree with the
enthusiasts, or do you think its view is somewhere in the middle from what you
know of government opinion from innovation or Defra or the new climate change
department?

Dr Santillo: I think it is difficult to say. I suspect the view is somewhere in the
middle. My feeling is that from
policy-makers they can see a huge scepticism and understand that scepticism
around geo-engineering techniques. I do
not think there is a lot of appetite for them at the moment, but there is a
danger that the more the commercial community, and to some extent the research
community, talks up geo-engineering as a solution, some of those assumptions
will begin to be set in policy that it is only a matter of time before these
things will work.

Q65 Dr
Harris: If one of these solutions
looks viable, the logic of your position is that you will be even more opposed
to it because it will look even more tempting for policy-makers to shelve the
action that is needed to, for example, reduce emissions because one of these is
looking viable. You have an interest in
this not working.

Dr Santillo: Not at all.
The position that we put forward is that at this point, given the huge
uncertainties and unknowns regarding even the effectiveness of some of these proposals,
that at this point none of them are a viable option and we should focus our
efforts where we need to put them.

Q66 Dr
Harris: You do not think people will
start wrecking field trials of this technology like some people did for
GM? I know with your formal backing you
would never back illegal vandalism, but some people identified with your cause
there. You are not envisaging that sort
of reaction to this technology, are you?

Dr Santillo: I have no idea how people other than myself
will respond to these issues, but I do not think we are in that same sort of
debate. In this situation we are talking
about something that could possibly happen 20 or 30 years from now that people
are talking about researching at this stage.
All I am saying in our evidence is that we need to not provide a barrier
to that research but it has to be done in a legitimate, transparent way and in
a way which follows a set of very clear and precautionary rules.

Chairman: I think Dr Harris would agree with that. Can I thank Professor Brian Launder,
Dr Dan Lunt and Dr David Santillo for being our first set of witnesses on
this particular inquiry; thank you all very much indeed.

Chairman: We have a video-link from the United
States in this particular section where we have Professor
Klaus Lackner from ColumbiaUniversity who will be
giving evidence as well. We welcome
Professor Stephen Salter from the University
of Edinburgh. We welcome Professor Ken Caldeira from the
Carnegie Institution and we would like to thank you for coming all the way from
the United States. Welcome to the House of Commons and to the
Select Committee Inquiry. Finally, I
welcome Dr Vicky Pope from the Met Office.
The Met Office has been a good friend to our Committee over many
inquiries and we are very pleased to have you here.

Q67 Mr
Marsden: If I may start by getting a
quick summary from all three of our professors this afternoon on how you have
actually funded your programme on geo-engineering research to date and what has
been the biggest challenge in taking them forward.

Professor Caldeira: I have the good fortune of working for the
Carnegie Institution which is funded by an endowment left by Andrew Carnegie in
1902. My funding is covered by that and
I also get some philanthropic funding to support post-doctoral researchers in
this area but I have no federal or public funding at all.

Q68 Mr
Marsden: What has been the biggest
challenge in taking your research forward?

Professor
Caldeira: I am a big advocate of
research. I do not really consider
myself an advocate of geo-engineering. I
think these schemes have the potential to diminish environmental risk. We do not really know whether they will or
not. I think the politics around this
makes it difficult to discuss these issues in a neutral and balanced way. What I would like to see is more research
that focuses on this topic in a balanced way on empirically answerable
questions.

Professor
Lackner: Thank you for inviting me to be part of
this. I am the director of the Lenfest
Centre for Sustainable Energy here at ColumbiaUniversity
and so a good fraction of my funding is actually derived from the generosity of
a single individual, Mr Lenfest, a trustee of the university, who has endowed
and supported the Centre. At the same
time we have small amounts of money from government funding to deal with what I
would call the carbon cycle engineering.
A few years back in 2003 we managed to get a small company started which
got its money as a start-up from what is called Angel funding in order to demonstrate
that the capture of carbon-dioxide from the atmosphere is really possible.

Professor Salter: I have had no money at all. I have had a promise from Ken Caldeira that
he will pay my travel for going to some conferences but that is all I have had.

Q69 Mr
Marsden: What has been your biggest
challenge? Clearly money is a challenge,
but are there others?

Professor Salter: The biggest challenge is there are only seven
days in the week.

Professor
Caldeira: I have had advertisements
posted for post-doctoral researchers in this area and I have been unable to
find good qualified people who have the technical skills to work in this area.

Q70 Mr
Marsden: What is interesting from the
range of responses that the three of you have given are a couple of references
to public funding in small amounts, but the majority of what we are talking
about has been private entrepreneurial activity. Professor Salter, looking at it from the UK
perspective, do you think that is the most appropriate mechanism to take this
research forward?

Professor Salter: It would be sensible to have the normal
grant-giving process allowed to cover geo-engineering. I have applied to the Engineering and
Physical Sciences Research Council and they turned it down.

Q71 Mr
Marsden: Do you know why?

Professor Salter: Yes.
One of the referees said that we had not put enough effort into how we
disseminate the results. You only need
one tiny negative comment for it to be thrown out and it does not even get to
the panel. I am trying again at the
moment from the Environment Research Council and I have to put a proposal into
them for early December.

Q72 Mr
Marsden: From the US perspective,
again the majority of your funding appears to have come from private
sources. Is that realistic, given the
huge scale of the potential that that should remain in the private sector?

Professor
Caldeira: Because climate engineering
has the potential to reduce climate risk cost-effectively, I think it is
important to research it as a possible kind of emergency response approach and
it will need public funding and it should be public funding because there
should be no real commercial market for these technologies. It will be the public sector that should
deploy it and policy-makers need unbiased and accurate information and I think
public funding is the best way of achieving that.

Q73 Mr
Marsden: Professor Lackner, the new
President Elect of the United States appears to be far more positive and
responsive in some of these areas of climate change than the existing one. Would it be your expectation that there might
be a role for more public funding in this area under the new administration?

Professor
Lackner: I would expect so and hope so, but let me make
a distinction between climate change engineering, which is what first comes to
mind when people talk about geo-engineering, and contrast it with what I would
call carbon cycle engineering. I think
climate change engineering is a last resort and should be treated like
that. It is like if I had a fire and the
house burns down you will accept the water damage and in many ways if carbon
dioxide were smelly we would not solve the problem by giving out nose plugs; we
would stop putting carbon dioxide out because it is actually the approach. I would emphasise that end capture, for
example, has been considered. A geo-engineering
method is quite different because it goes to the root of the problem so I do
believe we need to have public researched support for all of these issues, but
they have to be put in perspective for what the goals are. I do believe it is necessary to effectively
reach a carbon neutral energy infrastructure.

Professor
Caldeira: To support what Klaus said,
these various climate engineering approaches might reduce risk in some ways and
introduce new elements of risk, whereas I do not see the kind of thing that
Klaus Lackner is working on removing CO2 from the atmosphere as
introducing new elements of risk in the same way that climate engineering
does. Personally I do not even consider
what Klaus does to be in the realm of climate engineering. Basically removing carbon dioxide from the
atmosphere should be uncontroversial, whereas I think well-informed,
intelligent people can differ on the wisdom of focusing on direct climate
manipulation.

Q74 Dr
Iddon: Professor Lackner, is there a
national geo-engineering research programme established in the States?

Professor
Lackner: No, there has not been. Are you asking me whether it should be?

Q75 Dr
Iddon: Yes.

Professor
Lackner: I would again treat it with caution. I would view this as the backstop. We need to consider what happens if climate
change runs away much faster than we thought, but I think it is very important
also in public discourse to make clear that, by itself, it does not solve the
problem and only allows you to tie over until you have really solved the
problem in a direct manner, namely dealing with the carbon dioxide.

Q76 Dr
Iddon: I ask the same question of
the people in the room here. Do you
think a national geo-engineering programme should be established and how should
it be structured, if you agree?

Professor Salter: Yes, you should certainly have it. I think you could probably build it onto the
existing research councils with perhaps some ring-fenced money that the
government decides on the amount.

Q77 Dr
Iddon: Is that agreed by our other
two guests or do you have different views?

Professor
Caldeira: I am basically in
agreement. Dan Lunt is an example of a
scientist who is working primarily on other sorts of climate change problems
but focuses some of his energy on climate engineering. I think that is a good model. We do not need to create a cadre of climate
engineers. I think we need climate scientists and good engineers who can then
apply their skills to this problem too.
I do not think we are looking to develop people with a vested interest
in specific outcomes.

Q78 Dr
Iddon: Dr Pope, do you agree with
those views or do you have a different view?

Dr Pope: Yes, I would agree with those views. The focus has to be on science to improve
mitigation and obviously adaptation to unavoidable climate change. Many of the techniques that are available for
looking at the impacts in mitigation can also be used to look at
geo-engineering as well.

Q79 Dr
Gibson: Is this kind of research
better done in a university environment or should you have a kind of hub
mentality where it is all concentrated in one place and little bits spew out
now and again? It may be different in
both countries because the university environment in Britain is kind of like
that at the minute in terms of its funding.
What do you think in the States and/or in this country, Professor
Caldeira?

Professor
Caldeira: I admit a vested interest
since I am located at Stanford and have a new position at Stanford as well, but
I am a big advocate of university competitive funding. I also think that the big research centres
like NCAR and the Hadley Centre have made incredibly valuable
contributions. On the climate science
side I think there are existing institutions and it is a matter of increasing
the scope of the research and the funding.
On the engineering side it is very different because there is nobody
trying to build deployment systems today and this might need to be treated in a
different way.

Q80 Dr
Gibson: You would support from your
experience Tyndall Centres and Hadley Centres doing this kind of work?

Professor
Caldeira: Yes.

Q81 Dr
Gibson: In a competitive way?

Professor
Caldeira: I am a big fan of the
competitive peer review process. I think
all of this research should be in open literature. There should be nothing classified or
closed. I would like to see it as an
open and competitive process as much as possible.

Professor Salter: I have had a great deal of help from the
National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado,
with suggestions and numbers for the work I have been doing. I think you can mix big laboratories and
universities. I think universities
probably have a more rapid response and can come up with ideas a bit more
flexibly than a laboratory where people are told what to do. I feel, and maybe I do not have any evidence
here, that places like the Hadley Centre would be more effective if the
individuals there could have a fraction of their time - say 25 per cent - to do
exactly what they wanted to do rather than being told what the government
department wants.

Q82 Dr
Gibson: There is a challenge for
you. I am sure you agree with that.

Dr Pope: Maybe I should just introduce the Hadley
Centre and my role. I am Head of Climate
Change Advice at the Met Office Hadley Centre.
I am sure you all know that the Met Office provides the weather forecast
everyday but it also hosts the institution that provides climate science to
underpin government policy. We are
commissioned in the Hadley Centre by DECC now, formerly Defra, and the MoD to
provide independent climate research to underpin policy. A very large part of that work is to develop
one of the world's leading climate models and these climate models, as was
mentioned earlier, are now getting into the earth system realm so they can
represent both biological and chemical processes as well as the main climate
process in the atmosphere, the ocean and the land surface. We do have the tools available to look at
many of these sorts of issues. My role
is to provide the interface between the science and the policy-makers. I am the person that tells the scientists
what to do but, believe me, they are scientists and they do what they want as
well. They will challenge that and say
these are the important issues and come back to the government departments and
say should we not be looking at this. It
is very much a two-way process and I am very much in the middle of that. If we believe that something is important for
climate change we will look at it. I
wanted to give a couple of examples of two recent studies that have not been
published yet. One has been accepted for
publication and another one has just been submitted that look at some of the
issues involved. One study showed that
if you take short term intervention - the direct climate engineering that
people were talking about that act in the short term - they could actually mask
climate change and when those interventions stop you will actually end up with
higher levels of climate change than you had before. Really you need to look very carefully at
those things. Another example is if you
make changes to the climate on a regional scale they can have adverse effects
in other regions of the globe. The
climate system is very interlinked, so changes in one place affect other
places, and it is only by running climate models that we can assess those
impacts. Even if you switch the
engineering off, the impact could be irreversible, so you could have a long
term detrimental effect that you perhaps had not anticipated.

Q83 Dr
Iddon: Dr Pope, we believe that one
of the things that your organisation has been looking at is the consequences of
cloud albedo enhancement. Could you tell
us what that is and how you have been going about it? Is it modelling, or real experiments, and
what are the main lessons of that research?

Dr Pope: We took the proposal that Professor Salter
came up with to alter the properties of the clouds and essentially we did not
look at any of the engineering issues; we just assumed that it would work and
make a large impact on the stratocumulus clouds. These are clouds off the coast of Africa and South America. We
looked at what the consequences of that would be for the climate as a
whole. What we found was that if you
changed the cloud sufficiently to have an impact on climate to actually reduce
the warming that will also have consequences right the way round, particularly
in the tropics, so it could change the El Nino, for example, which is very
important for climate variability. It
could enhance the destruction of the rain forest. We already know that climate change is likely
to cause die back of the rain forest and it could make that worse. If you then switch that engineering off and
stop producing the aerosol and you stop brightening the cloud, the cooling goes
away and you get enhanced warming, but the changes in the rain forest could
effectively be permanent because it takes many thousands of years for it to
recover.

Q84 Dr
Iddon: Is this virtual work or
actual work?

Dr Pope: It has to be virtual. What we are looking at is not a prediction of
the future; it is a projection of what might happen, so it is about looking at
the danger inherent in the change that you are making. When we look at predictions of climate change
and we look at the worst case outcomes of an unmitigated world, we are looking
at the dangers of that happening. We are
not looking at something that will definitely happen. In this case we are saying if we made this
intervention on climate what is the danger from that?

Professor
Lackner: I would argue that we are not ready to do
serious climate engineering in this day.
I do hear people who say we should not even study it for that
reason. I am opposed to that and the
answer is, as you have just heard, there are all sorts of side-effects and I
think it is therefore very important that we do basic research and most of this
will, by its nature, be virtual. It is
important to do that because if there is a crisis we will not have time to do
it and we might go down a road which might be potentially far more dangerous
because we refused to look at it earlier.
It is better to know what the consequences would be so that when there
is a crisis we know how to act because in a crisis we will take the easy way
out of whatever it may be, even if it turns out to be a bad idea.

Professor
Caldeira: If we take the risk of
dangerous climate change seriously and the risk of a climate emergency
seriously, if a climate emergency did occur there could be great pressure on
politicians to do something right away.
Transforming our energy system and reducing greenhouse gas emission
takes a long time, whereas it is thought that we could put dust in the
stratosphere within a few years and start changing climate right away. If it turns out that these proposals do not
really reduce climate risk, but merely create new forms of risk, there could be
political pressure to do something right away and then we do something that is
a big mistake and so it is important to do the research now, even if it is just
to show that these proposals do not really make sense. I would point out that while these
simulations have shown that climate engineering is unlikely to reproduce the
status quo ante, nearly every simulation has shown that there is the potential
to reduce overall amounts of climate change.

Q85 Dr
Gibson: There are still arguments,
are there not, about the models to use for albedo enhancement and so on. You are not agreed on one model but on
several and scientists are arguing about particular models. Is that the state of affairs?

Dr Pope: There are obviously uncertainties in the
science and I think this was discussed earlier.
All of the models show that climate is warming. They all share very many characteristics. What they differ in is the degree of the
change and the details of the regional change.
By using a number of different models that make different assumptions
about the science, you can actually look at the range of possible outcomes and
we are now able to start looking at the probabilities of different outcomes so
that we can assess risk. It is really
about risk assessment. No prediction of
the future can give you an absolute prediction of any sort. What we are really doing is assessing
risk.

Q86 Dr
Gibson: So you need that variability.

Dr Pope: We do, yes.

Q87 Dr
Gibson: What is your interaction with
academic centres and commercial organisations?

Dr Pope: Our interaction with academic centres is very
strong.

Q88 Dr
Gibson: Which ones?

Dr Pope: Let me explain how a climate model works. No one centre anywhere in the world has all
of the expertise that is required to develop an earth system model. We have to work very closely with people in
the academic community. We work very
closely with people in the UK,
for example, experts on the biology of the oceans, experts on the land surface,
and we have joint projects. We are
formalising that much more mainly through the Natural Environmental Research
Council and the universities in many parts of the UK get funding from there.

Q89 Dr
Gibson: Am I right that the Tyndall
Centres are ripe within university structures?

Dr Pope: The Tyndall Centre is a distributing centre of
researchers across the university sector with its hub in the University of East Anglia. They are not really involved in climate
modelling.

Q90 Dr
Gibson: I never know the difference
between you and the UEA. It is either
you or the UEA in TheGuardian first. You seem to be saying very similar things.

Dr Pope: We say very similar things because of the
broad consensus. If you look at the IPCC
report there is a consensus of all scientists but the structure of the work
that we do is very different. It is very
complementary.

Q91 Dr
Gibson: What about commercial
interests?

Dr Pope: The Met Office does a small amount of work for
commercial organisations but certainly not in this area.

Q92 Dr
Gibson: Is it insurance companies?

Dr Pope: That kind of thing.

Q93 Dr
Gibson: Or really that kind of
thing? The scope of the Environmental
UEA was to work with Norwich Union in the beginning. I remember it well because they wondered what
the weather was going to be like in Pakistan in 20 years' time. Do you have that kind of interaction?

Dr Pope: We have some interaction with the insurance
industry and a lot of interaction with the energy industry, for example.

Q94 Dr
Gibson: Do you feel that your work is
independent from what they want?

Dr Pope: All of our scientific research is published
and is independent.

Q95 Dr
Gibson: Is it funded by them?

Dr Pope: Not work in climate change, no, or in this
sort of area.

Q96 Dr
Gibson: But in other areas?

Dr Pope: In other areas, yes.

Q97 Dr
Gibson: How much?

Dr Pope: I am not sure of the exact figures but we can
get that for you.

Professor Salter: I wanted to say something about the particular
study that Dr Pope mentioned. What they
did was to pick the three most sensitive areas in the world for doing the cloud
albedo change and put a very large stimulus into those. This produced some interesting effects in
other places as well as what you would expect to get locally. They were not quite the same as the
predictions from another model that was done in America
at Boulder. One of the differences was that they used
what is called a "slab" ocean model whereas the Boulder one allowed the ocean to respond to
what you had done to the air above it. The
comparison with what we would like to do compared with what they have analysed
is much more like somebody who says he thinks he can cure back pain with the
right kind of massage and this is tested out by a terrible punch in the solar
plexus. We would not want to do the
distribution of the spray in that particular way. We are not surprised that it produced funny
things in other places. I think what you
do depends on where you do it and the time of year that you do it. I would love to see an experiment where I did
one thing on one side of the pacific and then on the other and see how I could
adjust this musical instrument to produce nice chords rather than the first
rather nasty sound that we got when we just did that to it.

Q98 Chairman: I am getting quite depressed now.
I am sorry, Professor Lackner, it is a feature of my personality, but I
expected this afternoon there to be a great deal more enthusiasm for
geo-engineering coming over. Professor
Lackner, there has been a number of companies in the United States who actually
have seen that they can make a profit out of putting iron filings into the
sea. For instance, Climos, a company
that is still trading in the United States, believes that they can
actually make a profit there. Do you
think that any of these commercial companies have a hope in hell of making a
profit out of this particular geo-engineering technique if, in fact, carbon
starts trading on the world markets?

Professor
Lackner: If your goal is to put sulphate in the
atmosphere I do not see how you are going to do that.

Q99 Chairman: Let's put iron into the oceans.
Is that going to bring me a return on my investment?

Professor Lackner: In this
particular case I doubt it because the environmental consequences are hard to
understand but, if you start getting into carbon capture and storage more
broadly, I think it is very likely that people can make money provided there is
the political will to put a price on carbon.
I do believe you have already started that in Europe
successfully, so it is possible to build things around this model but you have
to show the carbon and you have to put it somewhere and demonstrate that it is
indeed put away. The particular issue
you raised with the iron fertilisation is: is it really put away, or is it
coming back in 20 years from now? What
are the environmental consequences of doing it?
I do believe there is a large spectrum of options. Maybe I am biased because I am involved in
one of them, but capturing carbon dioxide in a power plant or from the air by
biomass, or by chemical means, is feasible and does not have to have a big
environmental impact. In that sense we
can be enthusiastic that the world can move towards a zero carbon energy
infrastructure which may still, to a large extent, be driven by fossil
fuels. This is quite possible and quite
real. Frankly, it has to be what we do
because it cannot keep going up every year for the next 150 years. This is the trajectory we are on and even
holding that rise constant requires drastic changes in our energy
infrastructure, so it is absolutely necessary that we focus on carbon capture
and storage in managing the carbon cycle.
I think there is no way around that and it is feasible and possible.

Q100 Chairman: If we leave carbon sequestration to one side as a technology,
because I think most of us would accept that that is a very sensible technology
to use, are there any other geo-engineering solutions that you feel have a
commercial potential, Professor Caldeira, which ultimately might drive this
science?

Professor
Caldeira: I think there are potential
areas of research where there could be co-benefits. One example, and this might also sound as far
out as climate engineering, but the number of people looking at the potential
for extracting wind energy from high altitude winds where the wind is much
stronger and blows more steadily, one of the big challenges of that is
maintaining a tethered platform at altitude.
This could not only affect high altitude wind power, but if you are
going to disperse particles up high you would like a platform there; also to
recharge electrically powered surveillance planes you might want a platform up
there also. There might be research into
maintaining high altitude platforms that could have co-benefits where climate
engineering would be one of the benefits.
I would like to take the opportunity to comment on your point about the
lack of enthusiasm here. I think that
thoughtful people are not enthusiastic about climate engineering. Thoughtful people would like us to see deep
reductions in carbon dioxide emissions and see those reductions soon. It is really a certain sense of despair that
we are not seeing those cuts quickly that is pushing us to consider these
things. I really look at Klaus'
proposals as a form of carbon capture and storage and personally I would not
classify what Klaus Lackner is researching as geo-engineering.

Q101 Ian
Stewart: There are bodies like the
Tyndall Centre who argue that attention needs to be paid to the phasing in of
schemes in relation to geo-engineering running alongside other abatement
measures. As I understand it, Professor
Salter, amongst others, has argued that it may even be too late to deploy
geo-engineering technologies in line with this.
Bearing that in mind, can you say whether we still should go ahead with
the development of geo-engineering schemes?
If so, do we have the skills in the undergraduates and graduates that
would allow us to do that?

Professor
Lackner: If your question is with respect to
manipulating the climate, I do not think we have the skills to do this
today. We should learn about it and we
should have it ready in case we need it, but I would very much view that as an
effort of last resort. We cannot solve
the problem. We cannot stop the CO2
from accumulating by changing the climate and I would argue that this is such a
complex system that you really do not want to do that unless you really have no
choice left. If the glaciers in Iceland
are falling into the ocean maybe you have no choice, but you should not think
of this as the way you stabilise the system.
That, in a way, answers your previous question. I do not expect people to make money out of
the Fire Department so I really do not expect people to make money out of those
kinds of geo-engineering efforts.

Professor Salter: The most urgent thing is to try to save the
Arctic icecap because, if we lose that, we have now got another very large
input of warming coming in from the sun.
I think that is particularly urgent.
The ice is vanishing much more quickly than the first studies of climate
change predicted; it really is going frighteningly fast. It is also possible that if we get very large
amounts of methane released from the seabed in the Arctic,
and also from the permafrost, that they could take over from carbon dioxide as
the main driver for global warming and then it would not matter how much carbon
we reduced, we would still have a climate change problem. I would rather have it available too early
than too late.

Professor
Caldeira: To address the moral hazard
issue from before, it is not clear what an ethical course of action would
be. If we did find that the sea ice is
melting and threatening polar bears and arctic ecosystems with extinction and
Greenland is sliding into the sea, is it better to say let's have that
ecosystem go extinct, let's lose Greenland and that will be a good motivator
for people to reduce emissions, or do you say no, we actually care about these
ecosystems, we care about Greenland and maybe we should put some dust in the
stratosphere to prevent this from happening while we are working on reducing
emissions. I do not think the ethical
and moral high ground is necessarily to say let's allow environmental
destruction to proceed unimpeded while we are trying to reduce emissions.

Q102 Ian
Stewart: Professor Caldeira, let's
take this example that Professor Salter has given and you have carried on
with. If we were to address that issue,
how long would it take us to develop the geo-engineering and how much would it
cost? Does anybody have any idea?

Professor
Caldeira: Nobody really knows but the
estimates in terms of cost are in the order of, within a factor of ten, a
billion dollars a year. It is the low
cost - I am thinking now of dust in the stratosphere scheme - of this that
makes it somewhat frightening because it might be so cheap that people might
want to do it because it is cheap and easy.
I think within a few years we could start getting the stuff up there
using aeroplanes or artillery shots or something while lower cost strategies
are developed. It is something that
could be deployed at relatively low cost and relatively quickly. The question is are there unanticipated
damage or even anticipated damage that doing that would create? It is important to do the research up front so
that if you do find that there are environmental consequences of global warming
that you would like to prevent using these approaches then you are not just
creating bigger problems and that is why we need the research.

Q103 Ian
Stewart: Is there a technology that
seems to hold the most promise in relation to these matters?

Dr Pope: I wanted to come back to the point that
Professor Caldeira made that what we need to be concentrating on is removing
the greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.
Whether that is by reducing emissions or removing them artificially,
those are the key to solving the problem.
On the point about climate engineering - trying to alter the climate to
compensate and of course there is the question of unintended consequences -
many of the changes that we are talking about are temporary. If we put aerosol into the troposphere, for
example, to seek clouds it only stays in the atmosphere for a couple of weeks,
so you have to keep putting more aerosol in.
If you put aerosol into the stratosphere it stays much longer, perhaps
for a couple of years, but you still have to keep putting the aerosol in. When you put carbon dioxide in the atmosphere
it stays around for hundreds of years.
If you are going to use geo-engineering as a solution you have got to
keep doing it for hundreds of years because as soon as you stop doing it the
warming goes up again, so either you have to decrease the emissions much more
quickly or you have to put up with even higher warming. You have to bear that in mind in looking at
the consequences.

Q104 Chairman: We are asking you to stargaze now in terms of which of the
geo-engineering techniques that have been mooted so far if you were a
government minister would you be urging resources to be put into? You have a new President, Ken. What would you ask him to do?

Professor
Caldeira: First of all, if I was the
new President I would be putting a small fraction of my total effort into
climate engineering, but within that effort putting small dust particles into
the stratosphere seems to be the most promising and cost-effective approach and
I would also put some resources into looking at the sorts of things that Steve
Salter has been talking about. I would
also be hesitant to pick winners at an early stage. It is important to fund a broad diversity, a
wide portfolio, of research options and not think that we have already thought
of the best approach or even thought of the most important negative
consequences that could occur.

Professor Salter: I would agree completely with that. I think we might need to have all of
them. In particular, we might want to
have the widespread effect that you can get from stratospheric aerosols where
they are doing a very big area which you might, in hi-fi terms, describe as a
woofer. You might also want to have a
tweeter, which is the local effect we can get from treating clouds
locally. We might have the Arctic ice to
recover; we might have a particular coral reef, perhaps the Great Australian
Barrier Reef where we focus particular amounts of cooling in one particular sea
area so that the water that flows from there keeps the coral. At the moment, however, I would be very
hesitant to attack any scheme that I did not know a great deal more about than
I do now.

Professor
Caldeira: May I amend my statement that
I would also fund the kind of work that Klaus Lackner is doing but I would fund
it out of a carbon capture and storage programme because I would not consider
it climate engineering.

Q105 Chairman: The last word to you, Professor Lackner.

Professor
Lackner: I would emphasise the carbon capture and
storage and I would advise against large scale experiments until we really
understand how it works. We are
embarking on something mankind might do over the next 200 years but I doubt
that we really understand what we are doing here.

Dr Pope: Of all the solutions that people might want to
look at, it is very important to look at all of the consequences of any
solution that people might come up with, so I would not advocate anything in
particular. It is important to try and
work out what those unintended consequences might be so that we are in the best
position to make decisions.

Chairman: On that note of unanimity, could we thank you very much indeed
Professor Klaus Lackner from Columbia University, it has been a pleasure to
have you on the video-link; to thank Professor Ken Caldeira from the Carnegie
Institution, thank you for coming to see us this afternoon; to Professor
Stephen Salter, the University of Edinburgh, thank you very much indeed, and last
but by no means least, Dr Vicky Pope from the Met Office. We are in your debt for joining us today.